by Chris Offutt
Taylor stopped working to dig through an immense pile of boxes. He found a pair of boots, a box of shotgun shells, and a metal water pipe. From a cardboard box, he pulled a gun cleaning kit.
“Brand new,” he said. “Never used.”
“Somebody must be moving on,” Rundell said.
“I believe so.”
Taylor held a plastic picture frame made to look like wood. The glass was broken. Behind it was a picture of a man and a woman. The photographer had used a special effect to nestle the couple’s faces inside a long-stemmed glass with a rose at its base. The man’s picture was slashed. Taylor studied the woman in the photograph.
“My opinion,” Taylor said, “some old boy just got his ass throwed out.”
“It’s our stuff now,” Dewey said.
“That ain’t all that’s up for taking.” Taylor used his fingers to comb his hair. He read the address off the side of the trailer. “Twelve Two-W. I’m getting me some strange.”
He carried what he’d culled from the garbage to the truck cab and slid it behind the seat. Virgil steered to an overhang of silver maples that turned their soft-bellied leaves to the breeze. The trees seemed dusted by snow. With the truck engine off, the silence was a weight pressing against Virgil. He’d felt it before, a heaviness as if he were compressed in deep water. The summer air produced a sodden force that cloaked sound and motion. You could yell and the moisture trapped your voice and held it tight.
The men carried their lunches to shade along the creek. Taylor didn’t eat, preferring his thermos of spiked coffee, cigarettes, and amphetamines.
“Say, Rundell,” Taylor said. “You been underly?”
“No, I feel fine.”
“Looks like you got the furniture disease.” Taylor tapped Run-dell’s big belly. “Your chest done fell into your drawers.”
Rundell knocked Taylor’s hand away and rubbed his gut. His flannel shirt was thin and faded as an old snake skin. Taylor laughed until the sound turned to a rasp. He cleared his lungs and spat a hocker the size of a pawpaw. He found his cigarette where he’d dropped it.
“A good cough is like running a snake down a drain, ain’t it,” he said. “Sure makes a cigarette taste right.”
He dipped his hands in the creek and scrubbed his fingers and face. He broke several twigs from a sassafras tree, peeled the bark, and rubbed the inner meat over his teeth and gums. He combed his hair without removing his hat.
“I’m heading on over to Twelve Two-W,” Taylor said. “That woman’s a-setting there waiting on me to come take a bite out of her.”
“Best tuck your shirt in,” Rundell said.
Taylor obeyed. He was very thin.
“By God, you look like a Christmas turkey,” Rundell said. “Plumb full of shit.”
“She loves me, boys. I can’t help it.”
The men watched Taylor saunter into the shimmering noon sun. Tendrils of willow swayed behind him like curtains. Virgil opened his dinner sack. Every morning he stopped by his mother’s house for a brown bag containing a sandwich, apple, and chips. She’d fixed him carry-lunches since he was six years old and walked to school with his brother and dog. Virgil went along with it now although he’d explained to her that it was no longer necessary to mark a V on the paper bag in crayon.
“What you got?” Dewey asked him.
“Pickle loaf and government cheese. Want some apple?”
Dewey ate his lunch from an old bread sack. It was the same food every day—leftover breakfast of sausage and biscuit. White grease on the sausage patty made it smooth as wax. Virgil passed the apple to Dewey, who dug his thumbs on either side of the stem, and split it down the middle. He gave the larger piece to Virgil. Rundell ate soupbeans and fatback from a thermos, with a chunk of corn-bread.
The muddy creek’s bank was strewn with plastic milk jugs and bread sacks.
“Creek’s got a bankful,” Rundell said.
“Don’t it,” Dewey said.
“You know that water runs into the ocean.”
“I don’t reckon.”
“Sure as Carter makes little liver pills.”
“You ain’t telling me there’s an ocean close.”
“It don’t have to be close, Dew. This runs into the Blue Lick River which feeds into the Ohio, and that goes into the Mississippi, and you know where that goes, don’t you.”
“Goes to Mississippi.”
“Well, yeah. But after there, that water runs into the Gulf of Mexico.”
“I don’t know,” Dewey said. “I never heard of no Mexican Ocean.”
“It ain’t a ocean. It’s a gulf.”
“Now, no, Rundell. Mexico is a country, ain’t it, Virge?”
“Right.”
“See there,” Dewey said. “No sense in a man who don’t know Mexico’s a country getting briggety over creek water.”
After lunch, Virgil lay beside the creek, listening to it splash against rocks. His father had grown up in an ancient log cabin that was still standing two counties over. It was on a farm that had been willed to another family branch as a means of punishing Virgil’s grandfather for slights so trivial that no one recalled them. Virgil had long wanted to buy the cabin. He would dismantle it and move it to a spot beside Clay Creek. He’d rent a mini-dozer and carve a road that wound through the woods. Virgil had been saving money for five years. He had never told anyone his plans.
“Here he comes back, by God,” Rundell said.
Virgil opened his eyes, blinking at the abrupt light. Taylor slung aside willow branches and kicked at a rock.
“Look at him,” Rundell said, “Hey, Taylor, ain’t you done a little early?”
“She’s a goddam prick-tease if ever I saw one,” Taylor said. “Wasn’t wearing enough clothes to wad a shotgun and stood there like a pullet with her lungs hanging out. I should have slapped the taste out of her mouth.”
“Got him a way with women,” Rundell said, “don’t he?”
“My opinion, she’s a damn lebanese.”
“Then what was all that man’s junk doing laying outside her trailer home?”
“She just don’t know it,” Taylor said. “Worse kind of lebanese there is. Only knows what she don’t want.”
“And what she don’t want,” Virgil said, “is you.”
“The worst I ever got was better than any you ever had,” Taylor said.
Virgil didn’t answer. Taylor talked five quarts to the gallon, but he never fought.
“What you ort to get is some rest,” Rundell said.
“I got eternity for that,” Taylor said. “Biggest thing I’m afraid of is getting old and regretty. I got me a uncle that way. Sumbitch just sets. Wouldn’t hit a lick at a snake. All he talks about is what he never done. About like Virgil’s going to be one day.”
“I do what I want,” Virgil said. As soon as he spoke, he wished he hadn’t.
“It’s what you don’t do that you regret. And they ain’t a man of us that don’t know what you ain’t doing.”
“What?” Dewey said. “What don’t we not know?”
“That Virge here’s letting that boy who killed his brother walk around.”
Virgil’s insides felt hollowed out.
“The way you act,” Taylor said, “they could start picking off the rest of your family. Was me, I’d do some waylaying.”
“It ain’t you,” Virgil said.
“They’re lucky it ain’t,” Taylor said. “Only one thing to think of a man lets his own brother rot without doing nothing. He’s chicken, ain’t he, Dewey,”
“Yellow stripey.”
“Cluck,” Taylor said, “Cluckety-cluck.”
Virgil stood slowly. He was trembling, and sweat rushed down his body. His entire world had shrunk to a narrow cylinder of vision that ended at Taylor. He moved toward Taylor, who took two steps back.
Rundell rose swiftly from the grassy bank.
“Taylor’s a damn fool and you know it,” Rundell said to Virgil. “Ain�
��t worth the powder it’d take to blow his brains out.”
Virgil slowly sidestepped him. Taylor backed away until he was against the trunk of a locust. He arched his back from the sharp thorns that carried its seed. Virgil stopped with his shirt an inch from Taylor’s narrow chest. He was eye to eye with the locust thorns above Taylor’s head, Birds ate insects that were blown onto the spikes, and after a fierce storm, he’d seen spindled birds eaten by a raccoon. If a wind came big enough to drive the coon into the barbs, he supposed a man would eat the coon. He wondered what animal would eat a man who got hung on the barbs, and the answer surged forward: a man would eat him.
He leaned his face to Taylor’s until their noses touched. When he spoke, his lips brushed Taylor’s mouth.
“I ain’t that hungry yet.”
He moved away from Taylor and down the slight slope and stepped into the creek. Water spiders scuttled from his shadow. Crawdads jerked backwards as if yanked by a string. The hollow opened and the creek became shallow, marked by ripples and tiny dams of trash. He walked steadily, his legs wet to mid-thigh. He climbed the bank through a high patch of ragwort. Riled bees flew tight arcs of warning before returning to their work. A frog hopped into the water and Virgil sat on a rock where the frog had been. A ladybug landed on his leg. The air was heavy with the musk of life.
He began to relax in the one place where he felt safe. He’d spent half his childhood in the woods, much of that time with Boyd. Among the oak and maple, pine and hickory, he had a sense of belonging that had always eluded him in the company of people. He tossed a rock into the creek. As a kid he’d supposed that all objects were sentient and had envied rocks their perfect existence. Nothing was expected of them. He and Boyd had spent hours discussing the imagined opinions of a tree, the road, or a cloud. Did a shovel enjoy digging? Did coal mind being burnt? Would a chunk of ash rather be a baseball bat or an ax handle?
The sound of the creek steadied Virgil’s thoughts. He remembered Boyd as a child climbing a tree and leaping to a sapling, which bent with his weight and eased him to the earth. Virgil climbed the tree. He stood on the limb for a long time, afraid to jump. Finally he’d climbed to the ground and headed home.
Now a red squirrel watched him from a log gone to peat, then fled through swaying fronds of cinnamon fern. Virgil began walking the creek bank. The air cooled as the hollow narrowed. He reached a split in the creek and took the smaller fork, a trickle that led into darker woods. Trees were huge and ancient, the land being too severe for logging. Birdsong rose and fell around him. The dense canopy allowed sun in a flowing mosaic of darkness and light. The creek ended at a rock wall green with moss and Virgil climbed the hill, following a crescent of pine.
The slope was steep and he moved in a crouch, his body close to the earth, limbs spread like a spider. At the spine of the hill he rested. Though he’d never been here before, he knew where he was. Town lay one direction and the rest of the world the other. He walked four miles along the ridge top before the last of the anger left him.
The smell of wood smoke drew him to a thin column of gray rising from a house. The back door was painted green to ward off witches. He circled the house to approach it from the front and a dog ran at him, barking. A board path was embedded in the yellow clay dirt. There was no grass. The topsoil had been scratched away by chickens, leaving veins of clay that ran between exposed tree roots. Tarpaper covered the house and an oak shoot poked from the roof. Green moss clung like velvet beneath the eaves.
A woman sat on the porch with a pistol in her lap. She stripped the ribs from a wide leaf of tobacco and pushed it in her mouth. Near her chair was a bucket and dipper.
“Where’d you up from?” she said.
“Ridgeline.”
“Fall off a train?”
“Walked from town.”
“You ain’t from there.”
“No.”
“Who’s your people?”
“Caudill.”
“Which bunch?”
“Biggest is the yellow-headed bunch. We ain’t the holler Caudills, if that’s what you want to know. We might be kin five or six grand-maws back, but I don’t claim it. My mother was a Cabe.”
“I’ve knowed many a Cabe.”
Her slight nod sent a ripple through the wattles of flesh below her chin.
“Could I might have a little water?” Virgil said.
“Drink all ye want.” She pushed the bucket to the edge of the porch with her foot. “You’ll have to open your shirtfront when you do it.”
Virgil unbuttoned his shirt. The dipper was stobbed in three places by whittled pegs. He eased it into the water to avoid bugs that floated on the surface. The woman leaned forward to study his torso as he drank.
“I suspicioned you for a haunt walking out of the woods that way, but you ain’t one I don’t reckon. Water drains right out of a haunt.”
“It does.”
“Did you not know that?”
Virgil shook his head.
“They’re awful bad to be dodgy, a haunt is. They stick like bark to a tree. Got to be nice by it, get that haunt so it forgets what it is. Then you catch it in a dry gourd. Wax gourd’s best, A gourd goes to rattling, it’s the haunt trying to out. See there.”
She pointed across the earth, the gesture setting to motion the hammocks of flesh below her arm. Four gourds dangled like skulls from a coffee tree. They were small and blanched by weather. Beyond them stood the dark woods.
“You’re the first man ever to come up here a-wanting water,” she said.
“I had in mind something else.”
“Did you.” She placed her hand on the pistol. “And what was that?”
“Whisky.”
“Whisky’s against the law.”
“I’m Boyd’s brother, Virgil.”
The woman lifted her hand from the gun. Her toothless grin was a stretched knothole.
“That damn Boyd was a case,” she said. “I heard he’s gone under.”
Virgil nodded.
“I’ll miss him,” she said. “Now, Little Boyd, what do you want and how much? I got brown liquor and white.”
“Half-pint of ever what he drank.”
“I stocked Maker’s Mark for him. Never sold it to nobody else. You sure you don’t want more?”
“No.”
“No you ain’t sure, or no you don’t want no more.”
“One’s good.”
“It wasn’t nothing for your brother to come up here four times a night. I’d leave bottles hid for him in a paper poke. He’d stick money in the poke and go on. That way I’d get me some sleep.”
She stepped inside and Virgil wondered where the pistol went. He hadn’t seen it disappear. She came from the house carrying three half-pints of bourbon. Red wax covered their lids. She leaned on the porch rail and passed them over, her shoulders humped around her zinc-colored head, making it look small. She waved away his offered money.
“That ain’t something you have to do,” Virgil said.
“Hush up and take it.”
Virgil slipped two bottles in his jacket pocket and opened the third.
“Whoa now, Little Boyd,” she said. “I only got one rule—no drinking on the property. That was my daddy’s law and his daddy’s before that.”
“This place was always your all’s?”
“No, my daddy, he was from down to Bell County. Kept a still under the house with the chimney running up through the floor and into the flue. That house set right on the state line. If the Tennessee law come on him, he’d just go over to the Kentucky room. And if the Kentucky law got after him, why he’d step into the Tennessee side. They got in cahoots on him once, and that’s when he come up here.”
The folds of her dress sagged heavily below her right hip. There was a hole in the fabric surrounded by a dark burn and Virgil realized where the pistol was hidden.
“By God, I’m going to break Daddy’s rule,” she said. “Just talking about that son of a bitch
makes me want to.”
She went in the house and came back with a jar of white liquor.
“Here’s to Boyd,” she said. “The whole county’s lucky he never got religion. Take a month of Sundays to get him saved.”
She drank half the jar off while Virgil took a small sip. She wiped her mouth and spat off the porch.
“Boyd was different,” she said. “You couldn’t tell if it was something missing or extra. He scared people, but there wasn’t no man more loved on this creek. That’s what got him killed, my opinion. Men wanted to be his buddy and women wanted him their way. He was like a new paint job on a car—you just had to run a screwdriver over it. People wanted him dead and didn’t even know it till he was. He never followed a rule one.”
She took a long drink from the jar. The liquor didn’t seem to affect her. Brush rattled behind Virgil and he spun, expecting to see a haunt funneling from one of the gourds, A tall man with a big head stepped from the woods. A cap clamped long black hair from his eyes. Most of his teeth were gone. A blacksnake twined his arm like a vine.
“Hidy,” he said to Virgil, “I’m Ospie Brownlow’s first boy, Ospie Brownlow.” He grinned at the woman. “Moses got a rabbit, Mommy. He done it slicker’n owl grease.”
“Give him here,”
He proffered the snake and it moved from his arm to hers, briefly encircling them in a dark nexus before it dropped to her lap. Its lower jaw hung slack, still unhinged from swallowing its prey.
The woman found a lump the size of a softball several inches behind its head. She placed both feet on the tail, wrapped her hands around its body behind the lump, and squeezed. When she’d gained some slack, she brought her lower hand behind the lump and squeezed again. The snake lunged at her but its lower jaw was useless. Sweat gleamed along her brow and slid down her softly whiskered jaw. She held the snake upright in her lap, its head knobbing the end. Slowly her hands moved up, forcing the lump through the snake’s gullet. She closed her eyes, jaw tight, chin tipped back. In a powerful motion, she jerked from the snake a pale clot of fur that thumped to the floor.